And to think that there were advisors within the US that urged US policy to be independence from French colonial rule.  In retrospect, would the wisest choice would have been to convince the French to grant independence to Indo-China, as the British had done in India?  History showed that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist than a communist and probably would have run a more independent course than a strict satellite of the Russians (not that they'd have been a satellite of the Chinese, given the animosities between the Vietnamese and Chinese).